While poking around on the web, I came across Kai von Fintel’s seminar notes on exceptives – great stuff! In addition to some more great resources on other work being done on exceptives (especially the Lappin (1996) paper which I was totally unaware of), Kai has a nice proposal at the end of the notes (pp. 5-8) for an NP-level approach to the exceptives. The idea is that the exceptives take the entire NP as its argument, but the NP is not your regular et,t GQ – it’s an et,ett with an extra argument slot in it! Yup! This fits in very nicely, I think, with the NP-S view of things. The pdf here is a short overview of Kai’s proposal, how it fits in with the NP-S analysis, and how to make Kai’s proposal variable-free using the tools given by the NP-S approach :-P

I’ve yet to work out the more complex examples, but I think they will fall out pretty straightforwardly.

emma :: Apr.24.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics :: 2 Comments »